Discovery of End User Assets

[Sarda702]

Hello Team,

1. My customer is not able to discover its end user assets currently and does not have any SCCM equivalent software to manage these assets. To get a better visibility of these assets, can I run the ITOM discovery on the end user assets and map them in CMDB? What are the pre-requisites to perform this? 70% is Mac OS based devices

2. The customer also does not have any visibility on how many laptops / desktops that should be ordered for procurement? Whats the best practice for getting visibility on devices to be ordered each month/ quarter?

[EricDohr]

So there are Assets and there are Configuration Items.  Discovery, given an IP range will find devices that based on conditions set in the Identification Reconciliation Engine (IRE) will place records in the appropriate CI Class.  If there is a corresponding Asset record (alm_asset), there will be a reference built between the Asset record and the Configuraiton Item.  Asset is used more for lifecycle and financial management where the configuration item is operational.  If there is not an Asset record, some CI Classes will automatically create a corresponding asset record based on logic with a Model Category and/or Hardware model

If they happen to have JAMF and Integration Hub, there is a spoke that may be of value for managing the Macs

Depending on their adoption of either ITSM Asset or ITAM Hardware Asset Management, that will help with their planning.  

Here are some helpful documents

Discovery - Process Workshop Presentation

Assets and CIs – Understanding the Difference

Enterprise Asset Management-Process Workshop Presentation

[Sarda702]

Hello Eric,

Thank you for the initial response. My question is a little deeper in the sense that I understand difference between Asset and CI. My question is the customer does not have a clear visibility of their end user assets (ie. laptops) should I be using the ACC Discovery for discovery their assets and then creating the relation between Asset and CI?  What are the things I should consider If I go down this route? I.e. should i set the ITSM Asset management before moving ahead with End user asset discovery?

Also, part 2, what is the best way to identify and identify the demand for end user assets if I have ITSM, ITOM within the enterprise? Should we integrate with Procurement systems and create requests whenever a new user joins the org.? ( customer has GreenHouse HR sys.) 

[Parag_Sanyashiv]

Hi Sarda701,

You can ask customer to opt for Agent Client Collector, the ACC-V provided visibility of the endpoint devices. Each device will require an agent to be installed on the endpoint and then will be discovered in ServiceNow.

Once you have ACC-V setup, you can also onboard the HAM capabilities and your point 2 will be sorted.

Regards,

Parag Sanyashiv

[Sarda702]

Thank you Parag!